/dev/syscon?

[John Temples]

Last night, I managed to get my ESIX console hung up.  I couldn't
switch screens, and anything I typed was ignored.  So I went to my
terminal to shut the system down.  'shutdown' told me it had to be
run from the console, as did 'init 0.'  So I tried 'init s'.  This
got me to an ENTER RUN LEVEL: prompt.  I typed '0' and the system
shut down.  This seemed a bit odd since I couldn't directly do an
'init 0' -- some sort of bug or a security hole?

The problem is that doing the init 0 from the terminal printed the
message '/dev/syscon switched to tty02' (or something close) at the
console and from that point on, certain console messages would appear
at the terminal.  Running 'tty' from the terminal printed
'/dev/syscon' rather than '/dev/tty02'.  I ended up shutting the
system down again from the console to get syscon back where it
belonged.  Is there a better way to do this?

(Sorry if this is an RTFM question -- Prentice Hall has my manuals
backordered till no earlier than October!  Does anyone know of a
source where I can get them *now*?)
-- 
John W. Temples -- john at jwt.UUCP (uunet!jwt!john)